5 Ways to Boost Employee Value Proposition

To attract and retain staff in today’s business world, employee value proposition needs to be high. You can increase EVP by: fostering deeper connections, being radically flexible, encouraging personal growth, focusing on holistic well-being and focusing on transmitting a shared purpose.

Now more than ever, in a post pandemic world, the quality of organization’s employee value proposition (EVP) is essential to attracting and retaining staff. Whereas senior management focus on corporate values alignment, corporate location and stability as producing high EVP, over the last three years employees focus more on the work environment, connections with co-workers and flexibility in work-life balance. In this article, we will be looking at research conducted by Gartner to identify five ways to boost EVP. We’ll also be adding some actionable insights to each element to help you get a concrete sense of how to boost employee value proposition.

Outline

• 💬 What is employee value proposition (EVP)?
• 💼 How has EVP changed post-pandemic?
• 🚀 5 Ways to Boost Employee Value Proposition
• 📝 Takeaways

Successfully fostering engagement and connection with co-workers starts from the beginning of a new hires experience with the organization. That is, fostering engagement starts during the onboarding process. We identified in our guide on how to design a successful 30/60/90 plan that all onboarding plans start with a learning phase. The learning phase of onboarding is a great way to engage a new employee and foster engagement and connection with his/her colleagues. You can ask your new employee to schedule 1:1 meetings with every member of their team.

In addition to this, flexible work conditions and providing autonomy to employees are best served by clear guidelines. A structured and well-designed onboarding process, allowing employee engagement, getting to know their colleagues and having that human connection during onboarding, leads to higher perceived EVP.

💬 What is employee value proposition (EVP)?

Pre-pandemic, the components of EVP have been presented as being broken down into five main components — compensation, work-life balance, stability, location, and respect. According to AIHR, “employee value proposition is the promise you make as an employer to your employees in return for their commitment. This promise entails the sum of all the benefits and rewards employees receive from the organization they work for.”

In short, employee value proposition is the sum of all the value an organization brings to an employee. This includes concrete value (access to benefits and pay) as well as less “concrete” value (fun working environment, learning, etc.). However, the 5 components that make up this definition were created pre-pandemic. With the pandemic having disrupted all of our lives and the way we conduct business, the very definition of what employee value proposition has changed with it.

💼 How has employee value proposition changed post-pandemic?

Employee value proposition has changed because employee’s top priorities have changed. Indeed, if an employee’s priorities change, companies will be forced to offer a different EVP to attract and retain employees. According to a study by PWC conducted in October 2021, employee’s top two priorities of an organization’s employee value proposition are:

1. Working alongside good co-workers
2. Work-life balance

Interestingly, the value proposition employees look for is mis-aligned with the perceived top two EVP priorities of senior managers, which are:

1. Value alignment between employees and the organization
2. On the job learning

The mis-alignment between senior management and employees goes far beyond the top two priorities, however. Indeed, employees ranked remuneration (including incentives, bonuses and profit-sharing schemes) as the 3rd top priority, whereas senior management ranked it as the 8th priority.

A May 2021 Gartner research of 5,000 employees and 85 HR leaders also confirms that the employee value proposition has fundamentally changed post-pandemic. Indeed, according to the research, individuals have become more attuned to emotional value in employment:

“In delivering on all aspects of this human deal, people perceive emotional value in employment in the organization by enabling them to feel more understood, autonomous, invested, cared for and valued. This reinvented EVP, designed to deliver an exceptional life, not just work, experience, results in higher employee satisfaction.”

🚀 5 Ways to boost EVP:

Having understood that employee value proposition has fundamentally changed, how can organizations embrace the new EVP and put forward more of a “human” focus rather than a work focus?

1. Enable deeper connections

Employees do not only want deeper work relationships — far beyond that, employees want to be able to form deeper connections with their own family and friends. Offering flexible family-friendly benefits like maternal/parental leave and/or fertility benefits that match employees’ and organizations’ needs are all ways in which organizations can enable their employees to form deeper connections. Providing local and broader community connections also increases the feeling of being understood.

Additionally, it is important to enable the opportunity for employees to form connections during their onboarding. You can automate the knowledge transfer component with an onboarding automation tool and use the time you saved to organize 1:1s across teams to help create the opportunity for human connection. While you can’t force connection, you can increase the opportunity for it to occur. Automate the knowledge transfer and focus on connection — no software can ever replace that.

Actionable insight: Conduct a survey among your employees to identify which “human-first” benefit they would be most interested in or proud of having: longer maternal/paternal leave, fertility benefits, community service paid leave, etc… Implementing a change like this and being explicit about your “human-first” approach can have tremendous positive consequences among your employees.

2. Radical flexibility

The second way to boost EVP is by being radically flexible. Flexible work conditions, including where when and how employees work, enables employees to feel autonomous. However, flexibility also requires a clear structure within which an employee operates. Being very clear about the structure, what is and what is not allowed is a requirement to ensure successful flexibility. These rules can be transmitted during the onboarding, as it provides the opportunity to set expectations and responsibilities of flexibility. These include reporting lines, team boundaries, which activities are flexible and what are the clear deliverables.

Actionable insight: Be explicit about your flexible work conditions. Are employees allowed to work from home on Fridays? Do you have “core hours” where employees have to be in the office (ex: from 11am to 3pm)? Whatever your method might be, be very clear about the rules surrounding your work conditions and communicate them clearly.

3. Personal growth

Personal growth has become an increasingly important element for employees. We highlighted personal growth in our guide on how to create a learning organization, and personal growth also showed up in our research around EVP. Simply put, employees want to be valued and know their development path within an organization as people, not just professionals. This requires personal growth opportunities, in their career, personal awareness and personal development.

The how, what, where, when and why of this personal growth opportunity should be built and communicated during the onboarding process. To quote our guide, “personal growth is the precursor to creating the organizational space for individual learning necessary for any positive change towards organizational learning”. Laying out the options clearly is an important and mandatory step to delivering the promised EVP.

Actionable insight: Survey your employees to see what opportunities they would prefer most in personal growth. Are they looking for up-skilling? Are they looking for mentorship? Depending on the answer, you can create a system to help them grow.

4. Holistic well-being

No, we don’t mean giving your employees access to yoga lessons (although that could be a good idea 🤸). In all seriousness, after the stressful and uncertain times of the past 2–3 years, mental health has come to the fore for well-being offerings. An increasing number of companies have implemented mental health benefits during the pandemic, benefits which are likely to stay. Access to such services should be made available and how managers support their employees needs to be communicated clearly. As highlighted in our article on the biggest challenges facing HR professionals, it’s important that HR departments build a culture of trust — especially around sensitive topics like well-being. Read our guide to read actionable insights to build trust around employee well-being.

Actionable insight: Offer mental health and employee well-being benefits to your employees, or at the least create a culture of trust and “no questions asked” for employees that may be suffering from tough situations.

5. Shared purpose

Flexibility, personal growth, well-being and connections are important, but so is an employee’s fit within the shared purpose, values and goals of the organization. New employees will have a sense of what an organization’s purpose is before commencing, but it is up to the company to clearly communicate the purpose, mission and vision of the company. This is best done during the recruiting stage and reinforced during onboarding. It’s important that candidates know and understand what the values of the company are, as any misalignment between their values and that of the company can lead to serious complications down the road. It’s important to clearly convey the shared purpose but also expanded on to include the broader societal and cultural impact the organization makes and where the new hire fits within it.

Actionable insight: Unless the company has a very strong mission, the shared purpose can often be lost and forgotten over time. As such, it’s important to remind everyone how their work impacts this shared purpose. One way to communicate is through internal quarterly meetings where executives communicate how their team have advanced on their metrics, and how those advances help the shared purpose of the company.

💰 Benefits of boosting employee value proposition

Gartner research has found that organizations that deliver on their EVP, experienced a 69% reduction in employee turnover. With average employee turnover costing 0.5x — 2x the annual salary of an employee, a 69% reduction in employee turnover is an non-negligible cost reduction. It is important to keep in mind however, that actually boosting EVP is not just about the promise in the recruiting stage, but also about the delivery of EVP during onboarding and over time.

📝 Takeaways

We’ve seen what EVP is, how it’s changed, how to boost it and what its benefits are. As always, we’ve regrouped our actionable insights as a list of takeaways.

Actionable insights to boost EVP:

1. Conduct a survey to identify “human-first” benefits your employees want/would be most proud of having.
2. Create a document clearly outlining the tolerated flexibility in remote work.
3. Survey your employees for the most requested personal growth opportunities (upskilling, mentorship, etc.)
4. Offer mental health and/or employee well-being benefits, or at least work to foster a culture of trust and acceptance surrounding these topics.
5. Repeat the shared purpose and clearly outline how an employee’s work helps in this purpose.

This article was originally published on Readii, where we publish free, HR insights every week.